In the layout of retail stores for the sale of many products, but particularly in the marketing of food, pet supplies, certain hardware and other types of goods that are packaged and stocked in a variety of quantities in labeled containers for display, a primary consideration is the maximization of product "packout", which is the term used for the stock density per unit area of retail floor space available for items that are for sale. The objective of maximizing product packout includes not only presenting the products in a manner that they are readily visible to the customer, but providing a stocking of quantities sufficiently large to supply customer demand without constant restocking. In attempting to satisfy this objective, consideration must be made not only of the volume of product being moved, but also the relative volumes of different related products or products of different package sizes that must, by their nature, be stocked and displayed together.
In the design of a stocking system, the flexibility of the display rack arrangement is a key to the ability to maintain optimum packout of a stocking system as the nature of the available products and the demands of customers change. This has resulted in the provision of a variety of adjustable shelving systems, most having some claim to advantage over others and each having shortcomings and leaving room for improvement.
A retail stocking system that has been developed and accepted widely in the food and feed industries is that known as the gondola rack. The gondola rack is a display and storage shelving system made up of a plurality of vertical uprights or standards that are secured to the rear of a load-bearing base. The standards so supported are strong enough to remain in place and support the loads of cantilevered shelves which extend forwardly over the base. The standards are typically positioned at fixed standard distances apart, of, for example, four feet on centers.
Shelving is supported on the standards of a typical gondola rack by shelf brackets that carry hooked tabs arbitrarily insertable in any of a series of holes in the standards that are vertically spaced at incremental distances apart, typically at regular intervals of, for example, each inch above the floor. The brackets are provided in various strengths and lengths to allow the flexible arrangement of shelves of a variety of sizes and load bearing capacity.
Unfortunately, the flexibility of the conventional gondola racks is limited. Bagged goods such as, for example, grain and animal food frequently are supplied in quantities of from one pound to forty or fifty pounds per bag. Conventional gondola shelving, four feet in width, even when used with the strongest brackets, shelves and standards, can accept stacks only of limited heights. Often, the full width of the shelves is too wide for the quantities being stocked, when the units are stacked to optimum space saving efficiency. Thus, the different products or sizes of products are must be mixed on the shelves and are thereby insufficiently divided and become disarranged by the customers helping themselves to the goods. As a result of such shortcomings of gondola shelves, such systems often have needed to be supplemented by totally separate less flexible systems to hold the larger and heavier containers of products. Such racks may have closer spaced vertical supports and support the shelves also at their fronts. This has required either that the smaller quantity containers of the same product be stocked separate from the larger quantities of the same product on less heavy duty shelves, or stocked on the upper shelves of the heavy duty racks which are stronger and more expensive than necessary to support the small item loads. In addition, these heavy duty shelves are less flexible, and cannot be readily reconfigured when products and quantity requirements change.
Accordingly, there is a need in the retailing industry, particularly for the sale of food, feed, and packaged fungible products, for a gondola rack based stocking system that has the ability to support for display a wider variety of packaged quantities of products with greater optimization in the packout of the stocked items.